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Nothing to Be Frightened Of | 
 enlarge | Author: Julian Barnes
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  13 reviews
Sales Rank: 1288
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 5.7 x 1.1
ISBN: 0307269639
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780307269638
ASIN: 0307269639
Publication Date: September 2, 2008
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Product Description
Two years after the best-selling Arthur & George, Julian Barnes gives us a memoir on mortality that touches on faith and science and family as well as a rich array of exemplary figures who over the centuries have confronted the same questions he now poses about the most basic fact of life: its inevitable extinction.
If the fear of death is “the most rational thing in the world,” how does one contend with it? An atheist at twenty, an agnostic at sixty, Barnes looks into the various arguments for and against and with God, and at the bloodline whose archivist, following his parents’ death, he has become—another realm of mystery, wherein a drawer of mementos and his own memories (not to mention those of his philosopher brother) often fail to connect. There are other ancestors, too: the writers—“most of them dead, and quite a few of them French”—who are his daily companions, supplemented by composers and theologians and scientists whose similar explorations are woven into this account with an exhilarating breadth of intellect and felicity of spirit.
Deadly serious, masterfully playful, and surprisingly hilarious, Nothing to Be Frightened Of is a riveting display of how this supremely gifted writer goes about his business and a highly personal tour of the human condition and what might follow the final diagnosis.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 8 more reviews...
 memoir on mortality January 7, 2009
Novelist Julian Barnes (b. 1946) was never baptized and has never attended a church service in his life, and so he's never had any faith to lose. He came by this unbelief honestly; his father was an agnostic and his mother said that she didn't want "any of that [religious] mumbo jumbo." But the certainty of total extinction, both personal and cosmic, and the terror which absolute annihilation provokes in him, causes Barnes to admit in the first sentence of his book that while he doesn't believe in God, he misses Him.
The title for his disquisition on death comes from one of his journal entries over twenty years ago: "People say of death, 'There's nothing to be frightened of.' They say it quickly, casually. Now let's say it again, slowly, with re-emphasis. 'There's NOTHING to be frightened of.' Jules Renard: 'The word that is most true, most exact, most filled with meaning, is nothing.'" Exactly where the emphasis on nothingness rightly falls is what occupies Barnes' considerable talents. The result is a book characterized by deeply personal candor and broad-ranging critical inquiry that encompasses art, music, philosophy, science, literature, and family memories.
The Christian story claims that Jesus "conquered death and brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel" (2 Timothy 2:10). This story succeeded, says Barnes, not because people were gullible, because it was violently imposed by throne and altar, because it was a means of social control, or because there were no other alternatives. No, the Christian story succeeded because it was a "beautiful lie" (53) or "supreme fiction" (58). It's the stuff of a great novel, "a tragedy with a happy ending." And good novelists, says Barnes, tell the truth with lies and tell lies with the truth. There's always a "haunting hypothetical" for Barnes: what if this Grand Story is true?
The strictly secular-materialist option is simple enough. When your heart and brain cease to function, your self ceases to exist. But in this view the "self" is nothing more than random neural events. There's no ghost in the machine to begin with, so in fact there's no "self" that ceases to exist. In post-modern parlance, personal identity is a social construction. But Barnes has nagging suspicions about this neat and clean scientific scenario. Even if they are hard to define or describe, a common sense outlook, endorsed by the vast majority of humanity that has ever lived, is that intelligence, aesthetic imagination, our moral impulse, consciousness, love, gratitude, guilt, regret, and the longing for immortality -- all of these seem to point beyond themselves. They have the ring of truth that makes them hard to define by mere biology.
And so Barnes wonders, given his genuine lack of religious faiith, is it proper to seek and to assign any meaning to his personal story? Does his life enjoy a genuine narrative? Or is it only a random sequence of events that ends with total extinction, such that any and all meaning-making is pure "confabulation?" One thing you can be sure of, Barnes reminds us -- in the end, it doesn't matter what you think. The divine reality, or lack thereof, is what it is, and so "the notion of redefining the deity into something that works for you is grotesque." There's a deep irony here. In his review of The God Delusion by the Oxford atheist Richard Dawkins, Jim Holt observes that if "the after-death options are either a beatific vision (God) or oblivion (no God), then it is poignant to think that believers will never discover that they are wrong, whereas Dawkins and fellow atheists will never discover that they are right" (New York Times, October 22, 2006).
Julian Barnes Confronts Mortality with Savoir Faire. December 20, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
"For me, death is the one appalling fact which defines life; unless you are constantly aware of it, you cannot begin to understand what life is about; unless you know and feel that the days of wine and roses are limited, that the wine will madeirize and the roses turn brown in their stinking water before all are thrown out for ever -- including the jug -- there is no context to such pleasures and interests as come your way on the road to the grave. But then I would say that, wouldn't I?"--Julian Barnes
English novelist, Julian Barnes, is best known for his second novel Flaubert's Parrot (1984) and his more recent novel based on the life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Arthur & George (2005). In his superb new memoir, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Barnes confronts the subject of human mortality. Now at age 62, death is something he not only thinks about every day, it sometimes that sometimes roars him awake at night, the effect of which has given Barnes a bittersweet appreciation of life, or as Somerset Maugham might call it, a "humorous resignation" toward life.
Prompted by the wake-up call to the reality of his own certain death ("le réveil mortel"), Barne's memoir is not so much a personal history of his life, as an "amateur" (as he calls it) philosophical meditation on his own inner world in the final act of his life. While there are frequent references to Barnes' friendships (or "memories of friendships") and family (who "are likely to reclaim you in death") along the way, Barnes' memoir is populated to large extent by the French writers and philosphers who have given his life meaning: Jules Renard, Flaubert, Montaigne, Stendhal, Flaubert, Zola. For Barnes, religious faith is not an option. The athiest turned agnostic admits he is envious of those with religious faith. "I don't believe in God," he writes, "but I miss Him." More specifically, he misses "the God that inspired Italian painting and French stained glass, German music and English chapter houses, and those tumbledown heaps of stone on Celtic headlands which were once symbolic beacons in the darkness and the storm," because he considers Christianity a "beautiful lie . . . a tragedy with a happy ending."
Science provides Barnes with little solace either, for "there is no separation between 'us' and the universe," he writes. Scientists have discovered no evidence of individual "self." Barnes insightfully examines the state of modern existence filled with daily reminders (bumper stickers and fridge magnets) reminding us that Life Is Not a Rehearsal; "our chosen myth" that our relationships, jobs, material possessions, property, foreign holidays, savings, sexual exploits, exercise, and consumption of culture equate to happiness; and America's ability to reconcile religion with "frenetic materialism." He reveals his admiration for those who simply remain true to themselves as they approach their inevitable ends, finding sublime pleasure in the world, even as they are leaving it, like the Flaubert scholar who said to his nurse, "You have beautiful hands." Barnes obseves, "wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice. . . . And there is something infinitely touching when an artist, in old age, takes on simplicity. . . . Showing off is part of ambition; but now that we are old, let us have the confidence to speak simply."
As with all his fiction, Barnes' writing here is a rare pleasure to read. It will remain with the reader long after the book is finished, or as Garrison Keiller has better phrased it in his New York Times review: Barnes' elegant memoir is "a deep seismic tremor of a book that keeps rumbling and grumbling in the mind for weeks thereafter" (10/03/08). Highly recommended, and among my favorite books of 2008.
G. Merritt
 Always interesting but did not quite fit together.... December 1, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Barnes is bright, entertaining, reflective, and knowledgable and all those positives come together in this discursive treatise on death and many other not totally aligned subjects. I enjoyed my time with him but I kept expecting just a little bit more insight into the main subject: death or rather the fear of death and dying. And yet...I did feel a bit better after finishing the book. Less alone? More aware of the fact that many other people share the same fear? And that many other people have difficult and strained family relationships and awkward memories of things left unsaid and unresolved? I think so. Somehow we do feel that it is all going to come together by the end, even though we must know that it is unlikely to do so. The book brought that vain yet obviously fairly common hope to our attention and dashed it in a pretty gentle manner. For that I am grateful.
CONCISION December 1, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
I'm an off and on again admirer of Mr. Barnes' work, having become smitten with "A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters" and then befuddled by "The Porcupine" (yes, the problem is clearly mine, not his). But in "Nothing to be frightened of" Barnes finds a compelling form for the application of his encyclopedic knowledge of literature and life. Great fiction, of course, gets harder and harder to invent as the volumes and ideas pile up. What Barnes does here is to reintroduce the personal essay (in an inventive shape), a form capable of more direct and specific communication than the inherently more meaning-malleable novel. And as such, in but one instance, Barnes provides one of the most concise and comprehensible summaries of the author / audience tangle I have ever read. And after reading it, I felt gratitude for such elegant and direct insight.
That response extends to his handling of the main topic at work here: death. Bringing an intricate and accessible weft to the many impressions, inferences, references and experiences surrounding death, often pivoting on a sort of sentimental peg (recognized as such by the author), that is a longing for the reassurance and comfort of faith set beside the knowledge that such reassurance is objectively unavailable. This results in an engaging argument with himself roughly summarized by "if the universe is so big and we're so close to nothing, what's wrong with a bit of self delusion?" a question that spools out across the 200 pages, down thoughtful and entertaining roads. Free of bile and cliché, open minded and open ended, this is all great stuff.
His emphasis in the last pages on being remembered by future generations, even just one reader among them, and even saluting his "last reader", is a tough thing to make sensible. Even if he today enjoyed an enormous readership of, say, six million, such a number would still only account for one tenth of one percent of the living, let alone past or future dead. My point being that an audience is not the sole measure of worth, and that obscurity does not demand either death or time to bestow its blessing. The weight of numbers takes care of that while we live and as we work -- no wait requir'd.
 Still Frightened November 11, 2008
7 out of 23 found this review helpful
Although there were interesting issues discussed about death and dying, Barnes also included a great deal of space to his childhood and memories about his parents with no particular relevance to what I thought was his central theme: reflections on death. The book lacked focus and an overall sense of direction. Barnes relied heavily on his own experience with the death of his parents and a number of French writers of the 18th and 19th century who wrote about this subject. In between writing about death and dying, he would bring up an incident from his youth (for example) when he was pushed by his brother on tricycle into a wall and how different people had different memories of what actually happened. This occurred a number of times and always left me puzzled as to why it was included in the book. Did he not have an editor to keep him on task? I can't really recommend this book and in the end it left me still frightened.
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